1. Field of the Invention
The present embodiments relates to methods, systems, and programs for storing data, and more particularly, methods, systems, and computer programs for storing data in a networked storage system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Network storage, also referred to as network storage systems or storage systems, is computer data storage connected to a computer network providing data access to heterogeneous clients. Typically network storage systems process a large amount of Input/Output (IO) requests, and high availability, speed, and reliability are desirable characteristics of network storage.
Some storage systems store data that may be repeated multiple times. For example, a storage system may provide backup for many desktop clients, and many of the clients may be running the same operating system, which causes the storage system to keep multiple copies of the same software.
Some storage systems analyze the data stored and aim at minimizing redundancy by keeping only one copy of data that has been stored multiple times, in a process that is often referred to us deduplication, or dedup for short. However, deduplicating data may be an expensive operation in terms of resource utilization, as deduplication requires analyzing the data to identify repetitions.
What is needed is a storage system that performs deduplication with minimal impact on the performance the system.
It is in this context that embodiments arise.